by Tim Kindberg
“Did I say ‘mental’? Did I go that far? I suppose I said ‘conscious’, didn’t I. Anyway, you are so right, Detective, to speak to someone else. Exactly what I would do, if I were in your shoes.”
There was sarcasm, yes, but Dirac touched his beads as he spoke, tugged at them like a shackled man. “I expect you will take them to an inner-network scientific authority regarding the first question. And ignore the second.”
That thin, super-intelligent, unmeant smile again. And the eyes. There was almost a touch of mentalmagic. David’s vodu was pondering Dirac too. But no, that wasn’t what was in the eyes. At least David didn’t think so.
“Would you do me a favour, Professor, and roll up your sleeve?”
“Really, Detective, do you imagine I’m a junkie, that what I’ve told you is drug-fuelled fantasy?”
“Please just do it, Professor. Your forearm only. I don’t think you’re an addict.”
The skin was wan, mottled. None of the snaking blue veins of the squatted distended it, like his own forearm. And that of Obayifa.
“Now will you show me yours, Detective?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
David regarded Breakage, in his good suit and elaborately patterned tie. The entire conversation seemed to have passed him by. Or not. There was no way of telling whether Breakage would keep to his pledge, to report to David before he reported to the network. But David was beginning to trust the bodai, despite himself.
“Where exactly will you take them to?” Dirac placed the case of bones on the table. David didn’t answer. Breakage took the case with strong, inauthentic movements. Through the window, the sound of the crashing sea entered, a sloshing where all fleshly life could return to one day: might as well return to now, reduced as it was to this paucity, thought David, this annexation by the network. He suddenly felt deep embarrassment for himself and all his fleshren at this reduction of a genius like Dirac to a service function – however little he was inclined to sympathise with the embittered man. The network has hived off the essential good in us, our creativity, David thought.
“You will be seeing me again, I suspect, Professor. Before too long.”
David pondered the professor’s words as they returned in the module. Dirac was right: the relationship between matter and consciousness remained a mystery, even in the late twenty-first century with its mastery of mental content. Multinats manipulated the genpop’s mental processes without true understanding. How did Dirac – and David’s desres, for that matter – detect a presence associated with parts of a skeleton – presumably inert – even given that they were connected to beads through circuitry? It made no sense. He would need to return to Dirac, who might be able to understand it.
Not that Dirac was infallible, as David knew from his research. Dirac had believed, falsely as it turned out, that when he discovered psychblood back in 2048 he was on a path leading to a cure for dementia. But then the multinats had seized the technology to deliver content telepathically, with IANI’s blessing. Ironically, it turned out that psychblood was the cause of early onset dementia, enfeebling the genpop like a plague.
A plague. The world was plagued. By vodus, perhaps, as well. If they were synthetic, the creations of Westaf renegades, then couldn’t they make as many as they pleased, and send them out to infect the entire Between? He had to pull himself together. Why would they do that? And yet, their experimentation on him, when the renegades captured him in Accra.city, had been merciless. He was a botched attempt to implant a vodu. Exact motive unknown.
At the N-car station, Breakage disappeared into the crowd as David boarded a heaving car. While they glided through the near-above, he thought about the smile that had almost broken through in the Spoons, the almost-smile that Breakage had sparked when he suggested working with Dirac. His last actual smile would have been for his daughter. Conversations with Mr Charles had generally been solemn. All joy, everything he loved, had been displaced by the twist of brooding malevolence behind bars in his mind. And his one friend was now lost to the creature Obayifa.
As David’s N-car descended faintly, Breakage came on board, a frail old lady, with news.
“Ship was boarded by unknown last night.”
“Why are you only telling me now?”
“Unknown. All is known.”
David closed his eyes, struggling with impatience.
“What instrumentation was available?”
“Mekhanik Pustoshnyy not repaired. Low priority. Scene-of-crime telemetry installed. Low resolution. One came onboard. Ten minutes. Then left.”
“Anyone posted there who might have disturbed them – it?”
“No.”
“Where did they go on board?”
“Cargo bay.”
“So maybe they were there for the bones. The scaffold we used to climb up to retrieve them – was it still in place?”
“Unknown. No data on physical configuration below priority levels.”
“Maybe it was Obayifa, after the case. Breakage, find out if there was CCTV.”
“Disused since Disruption. All is known.”
“It’s an old ship. Go and look for CCTV.”
“Big Mind detects all presences at all times through network. Beads—”
“Go and look for CCTV.”
Breakage left again. The case he held was emitting a signal of some kind, emanating a presence to the network, like a beacon. When she discovered the bones were no longer on the ship – if it was her; he’d better not assume too far – then she would look for them via the network. David looked around the carriage for her. She could be following him, for all he knew – following the case. She, on the other hand, was nonned. He would have to be vigilant, in the old-fashioned style, with his senses.
As if with X-ray eyes, he looked inside the case which lay closed upon his lap, to what he’d become one day. Fragments. And the vodu inside him? Surely it couldn’t live in his remains. It needed a mind to feed on – for it drained him, taking a trickle current of psychic energy. It would have to find a way to transfer itself before he died, before his psyche disappeared. A sudden lunge of sex drive engulfed him. The girls of the Hotel Royal appeared, leering as though they could stave off his unhappiness. If only he could rid himself of the vodu then he could try to love himself again. If only he could love himself he could perhaps rid himself of the vodu.
He tried to stop it, but David’s prick stirred. He took the case back to his desres and walked to the Royal. Once it had seemed reckless to visit the girls there, but it had been years since he began, not long after his arrival in Avonmouth.city. He was inured to it now: if you could be said to be inured to an addiction, a corrosion. Each time he asked himself where the drive came from, a drive that had never riven him in Accra.city. And each time the answer stirred in his mind. His vodu lay at the centre of his destructive desire, that much he knew. Perhaps it exerted an influence, willing him to spend himself thus. In any case, it had displaced all worth in his mind.
There were other places to find girls, but the Hotel Royal was convenient. He took himself offline a few blocks before he walked up the few stairs that led to an unimpressive entrance. So many gaps in his user journey. One day, one day soon he may have to account for them.
He asked the bodai at the desk for room 71, which was not the number of any room in the hotel.
The girl was not beautiful, or even particularly attractive. And she was tired. He had lain with her before. They all knew him: the man who left his shades and his shirt on. He placed his other clothes by the bed.
The act was over in minutes, taking its place in a blurred string of visits. The act itself was not the point; there was no point, only his dedication to a libidinous idea that he had never fathomed, a driven journey that never led anywhere.
David lay still, propped on his elbow, and looked at her. “What are you thinking? Oh, you’re not. What’s playing?” Sex workers were never truly exempt from sensa, because the network’s algorit
hms were incapable of detecting which parts of their lives were work as opposed to leisure. Sensa played in their minds, taking away from what little of themselves they were prepared to share. Perhaps it made their lives more endurable, after all, to be distracted. Like a patient in a dentist’s chair: vivid sensa played in your mind while they worked on your tooth.
“A bear!” she said. “A bear was brushing its teeth and a fox said how bright the bear’s teeth were. It’s a very good toothpaste brand. But the little bear: so cute and playful! Shall I share it with you?”
“Thank you, but no,” said David. “Isn’t there something else we could—”
“No,” she said quickly, her face clouding. “There really isn’t.”
She propped herself up on the bed and faced him earnestly.
“I’ve seen bears on my screen. Do they exist?” She lay back down. “Somewhere?”
When ID cops needed to interrogate someone, they could turn off their interviewee’s stream completely if necessary to ensure their full attention. David sometimes did this but didn’t feel like it now, not with her. He looked at her again, felt her through his beads. He was as close as you could get to someone. Almost inside her mind via his ID cop’s beads. And he was as far away from her as one could be.
He dressed as quickly as he could. As he left the Royal, the heat hit him again. The near-above was swarming. Its Spoons and Noodles – there were no other cafes or restaurants, only their clones – were packed with his fleshren, sipping and dining distractedly together, sharing tastes with remote friends. David had not eaten with anyone else since he left Accra.city.
He put himself back online.
David was called to the harbour. Breakage had been in touch with Lenczyk, who had thought nothing of the trespass on board the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy since no ID crime was deemed to have taken place. Lenczyk balked at first, but eventually understood that the request came from David and not the bodai. The harbour ID cop found a CCTV camera on board.
“Amazing,” he said. “Talk about antiquated! And forgotten about, I guess. Even more incredibly, there was still a way to play the recording.”
The footage was speckled and indistinct, taken at night, but it was her, all right. Lenczyk agreed. Breakage stood by in incomprehension. They watched a figure climb the scaffold that the ID police had erected after the dogs barked upwards into the cargo bay’s ceiling. She had found new clothes, but there was no mistaking the lithe body that ascended animal-like, quickly established the absence of what she was looking for, descended just as surely, then unwittingly revealed her face to the camera just before leaving its frame as she headed back to the quay. You could see a glow from her eyes.
“How far back does the footage go?” asked David.
“Only twenty-four hours,” said Lenczyk. “It’s a real shame. I’d have loved to see what that lot had got up to at sea.”
“Detective,” said Breakage suddenly. “Incident. Hotel Royal.”
David, cringing at the mention of the hotel, stared at Breakage for clarification. Eventually the bodai’s algorithms kicked in.
“Incident. Flesh required.”
“We’re busy. What kind of incident?”
“Flesh. Harm. Crew of Mekhanik Pustoshnyy.”
David had watched the crew leave ID police custody but had not attempted to track them. While Obayifa had made her presence known through Mr Charles and now her incursion into the ship, David had heard nothing of the other fifteen. He had assumed they were long gone.
“Lenczyk, please find out whatever else you can about her visit. Any data you can get your hands on.”
“But she’s been released.”
“And now she’s committed an incursion into a crime scene, has she not?”
“Very well.”
The Royal was not unacquainted with misdemeanours; its reputation had sunk since it reopened after the Disruption, or so one of the older flesh had told him. It was always invidious to go there for professional reasons, and he felt claustrophobic in the lobby. The bodai clerk took him to a room on the top floor where a commotion had been reported and no one had answered the staff’s knocks.
Inside were two men he immediately recognised as crew from the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. One stood on a dresser; the other had heaved an armchair onto the bed and stood precariously on its seat. They had consigned themselves to these paltry heights like lost angels – just as Mr Charles had climbed onto the furniture, according to Mary, after Obayifa had paid a visit.
They were alive but unresponsive to David’s questions. Nothing intelligible guided the movements of their unnaturally widened eyes, which roved, looking through David, the clerk and Breakage, who had joined them – looking straight through the Hotel Royal’s barely passable business-grade decor, its stock paintings of ships and sunsets, its soulless trappings.
And they too appeared to be soulless now, not even animals. Dolls. The dolls piqued the interest of David’s vodu, which cast its attention to these vacated beings without appearing to – but David knew.
He felt bound to try to talk to them for a while, however futile it seemed. Soon he gave up. Unsure of what to do with them, he called for an ambulance and told Breakage to arrange a bodai guard to accompany them.
David wondered why they had holed up in such an open place as the Hotel Royal in Avonmouth.city, and not disappeared into the fleshwork. Was it for a rendezvous – with Obayifa? They seemed to be wearing the same suits they had worn aboard the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy. They must have had something on their minds other than a change of clothes. While they had minds.
David had tried not to think – had pushed the memories away like a big black dog that wanted him – of Mr Charles, and the dolls that had started to appear around Accra.city, in the same trees where fruit bats hung in clusters. He pictured them along the larger branches, silhouetted against a sky that was emptied of light, these figures standing and wavering, staring out from amongst the foliage. Where they remained until, weakened, they finally fell to the ground. Not once had the perpetrators been caught: vampires who feed not on blood but the minds of others; the products of the renegades’ experimentation with vodu implantation; the monsters that David feared he himself would become if his vodu were to leave its cage, if he were to soften his heart.
On his way back out of the lobby, David passed one of the girls arriving for work. She pretended not to recognise him, in accordance with the protocol of the trade. She looked sad. Both she and David were adrift outside the rooms they used together, floating away from the chimerical anchor of their short-lived transactions.
His good sense told him to have the case secured from Obayifa, and soon. If he turned it back in to the ID police he’d never see it again. His desres wasn’t particularly secure – he shouldn’t have left it there. But there was no one he could entrust it to, except Dirac. Maybe. His labnode would be secure even though David still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure about him. Perhaps another word with him would help.
“Breakage,” David said to the bodai, who had accompanied him out of the hotel, “we’ll be going back to Dirac but I have something to attend to first. Keep yourself on call.”
Dolls. First Mr Charles, and now the two crew.
“Can I help you?” There was an ironic lilt to Mary’s voice when finally she answered. He could hear scrappy birdsong in the background.
“Where are you?” he asked, already knowing.
“Walking. Am I not online, like a good girl?”
“I have some questions. About Mr Charles. Don’t be concerned. It’s not about you.”
“Well then I suppose we could talk. Go ahead.”
“Not this way. Face to face.”
“You want to be up close to my beads. Well, I don’t think I would find that to be satisfactory, if you don’t mind.”
“You do recall that I am entitled – that I’m an ID cop?”
“Oh indeed, Mr ID Policeman, a cop who would like to keep part of his investigations unofficial
.”
David had nonned the call. It was better to minimise his trail to Mr Charles. “I’ve sent you a rendezvous. We can make it later.”
“No, I have a shift.”
“Now, then.”
David met her not far from the carie, on a transitway bench beside the tall windows of an officenode. The flesh within were bent at desks, silently composing documents, a task as yet beyond telepathy and still requiring screens and inputs. There had been a hint of playfulness in Mary’s voice during the call but now she was not in a good mood. David sat beside her but looked across at the surfaces of concrete and steel. He didn’t want the pain of seeing his daughter again in this young woman’s face. And yet he wanted to be near her.
“The woman who visited Mr Charles. Was it her?” He showed an image of Obayifa from the CCTV. Mary glanced at it but hid any sign of recognition or lack of it.
“I told you. I can’t be getting involved.”
“Just answer the question. I’ve screened you out. I’m on a case and that case isn’t you.”
She wore a thin dress in the heat. Mary was herself, her own person, in the flesh, whatever low-grade ID criminal the network would deem her to be. He could see what used to be called her humanity, when he tried.
Flesh boarded and disembarked from N-cars nearby. A huge grain silo, as it used to be, loomed beside them. Its brickwork, one of very few examples left in the near-above, looked unreal in the bright white light.
She had been thinking. “Very well, then. Yes. That’s her.”
“Are you sure?”
She didn’t reply.
“And she said she was a relative?”
“Which I didn’t believe, but I went and asked him if he wanted to see her. I could tell he knew she must be lying as well as I did. But he agreed.”
“So you took her to him. Then what?”
“He did a double-take when I led her up to him, but then he welcomed her, as though he knew her when he obviously didn’t. What would a man like that have to do with someone like her? What did you call her?”